though some eight years passed before he corrected the manuscript for
the last time (in 1903), it is evident from the numbers of entries in
his diary that it had greatly occupied his thoughts so far back even
as the period which he spent in Tiflis prior to the Crimean war. It was
then that the final subjugation of the Caucasus took place, and Shamil
and his devoted band made their last struggle for freedom. After the
lapse of half a century, Tolstoy gave vent in "Hadji Murat" to the
resentment which the military despotism of Nicholas I. had roused in his
sensitive and fearless spirit.

Courage was the dominant note in Tolstoy's character, and none have
excelled him in portraying brave men. His own fearlessness was of the
rarest, in that it was both physical and moral. The mettle tried and
proved at Sebastopol sustained him when he had drawn on himself the
bitter animosity of "Holy Synod" and the relentless anger of Czardom.
In spite of his nonresistance doctrine, Tolstoy's courage was not of
the passive order. It was his natural bent to rouse his foes to combat,
rather than wait for their attack, to put on the defensive every
falsehood and every wrong of which he was cognisant. Truth in himself
and in others was what he most desired, and that to which he strove at
all costs to attain. He was his own severest critic, weighing his own
actions, analysing his own thoughts, and baring himself to the eyes
of the world with unflinching candour. Greatest of autobiographers, he
extenuates nothing: you see the whole man with his worst faults and
best qualities; weaknesses accentuated by the energy with which they
are charactered, apparent waste of mental forces bent on solving the
insoluble, inherited tastes and prejudices, altruistic impulses
and virile passions, egoism and idealism, all strangely mingled and
continually warring against each other, until from the death-throes of
spiritual conflict issued a new birth and a new life. In the ancient